A deep story by Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, Bradley Hope, Tripp Mickle, and Paul Mozur in the New York Times yesterday suggested that the Trump administration has engaged in an astonishingly corrupt deal in which two multibillion-dollar deals appear to be intertwined.

In May an investment firm run by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controls the sovereign wealth of the United Arab Emirates, announced it would invest $2 billion in World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Trump family and by Steve Witkoff and his son Zach Witkoff. Steve Witkoff is Trump’s Middle East envoy. Two weeks later, the administration permitted the UAE to gain access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s scarcest and most advanced computer chips as part of a new deal to turn the UAE into an artificial intelligence powerhouse. G42, a technology company controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, would receive many of the chips.

“While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other,” the reporters write, “the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary.” “Put plainly, while the U.A.E. was negotiating with the White House to secure chips for G42, a G42 employee was helping the Witkoffs and the Trumps make money.”

—Heather Cox Richardson